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Print Newspapers Get Interactive With Kooaba Partnership With NewspaperDirect

Kooaba AG, a Swiss startup specializing in image recognition, and NewspaperDirect, a provider of multichannel newspaper and magazine distribution services, are partnering to connect more than 2,000 printed newspapers in 95 countries to the digital world. Using Kooaba’s Paperboy mobile app, readers can snap pictures of full pages or articles of interest in their favorite printed newspapers and share them immediately as PDFs via Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, or SMS—or store them for future reference on my.kooaba.com or Evernote. Available for iPhone and Android devices, Paperboy also gives access to additional information, such as videos or related online content. Paperboy can help bridge the gap between print and online, substantially expanding and enhancing the reading experience.

In the first phase of the rollout, the partnership with NewspaperDirect makes newspaper content immediately available within Paperboy in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria—for more than 75 additional titles. Among them: the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Austrian Der Standard, and Germany’s Der Tagesspiegel. More than 780 U.S., U.K., and Canadian newspapers will follow in November. Russian, Asian, and other European readers, as well as readers in Australia, New Zealand and all other countries will be able to use the Paperboy app with their local newspapers later in the year. Paperboy is available as a free download at http://www.paperboytool.com.

Introduced in 2010, Paperboy connects printed media to the digital world with one click. All the application’s powerful image recognition technology needs is a photo taken by a smartphone camera of an article or page in a newspaper or magazine. Paperboy then matches the photo to the images in Kooaba’s sizeable library of printed media or identifies that page or article from NewspaperDirect’s inventory of more than 2,000 same-day, digital newspaper replicas. Users can then share, email, or archive the electronic version on the go, anywhere, anytime or explore related information like videos, images, or links to selected topics. Paperboy automatically finds URLs on pages of print publications.